Riding on India's fast growing Internet penetration, the collaboration will help establish the foundation for a new ecosystem to help Electronic System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) companies and other companies of electronic city engage on IoT product development, the company officials said.

ELCIA has been chosen for this ambitious project as it is the only brown field ESDM cluster in the country, which has received an in principle approval for a financial grant from the government of India to spur innovation in product design and manufacturing, they added.

Electronics City is the biggest hub of Bangalore's IT industry located in the outskirts of the city. Spread over 800 acres, it houses 186 companies including biggies like Infosys and Wipro. The companies here have a combined turnover of over Rs 40,000 crore.

"Digitisation of the the country is what we are trying to do here in India, it is digitisation of Industry where we are trying to transform healthcare, aerospace and everything else; to do that we need to create new ecosystem, we need to create new models of businesses, we need to create new platforms and new innovation...

"...That is what we are trying to do with Electronics City Industries Association," CISCO President, Smart+Connected Communities and Deputy Chief Globalisation Officer Anil Menon told reporters here.

According to officials as part of this effort, Cisco will help provide the network infrastructure and expertise for testing and production of electronic product prototypes for an IoT enabled smart city environment.

Through the 'Living Lab'spread across 5 sq km area in the electronics city, ESDM start-ups and other electronic city companies can build solutions for City Infrastructure Management (CIM) including smart parking, smart CCTV surveillance, smart street lighting, smart water management/leak detection and community messaging.

The project will utilise the Cisco Smart+Connected City WiFi solution that will help enable community WiFi services and allow access to public utility offerings.

ELCIA will also embed Cisco network equipment comprising access points, routers, switches, and other required hardware and software applications that will be connected to the smart city's fibre-optic backbone network, they added.

He said the first phase of this smart city project will be rolled out in Electronics City and will serve as a replicable model for the rest of Bangalore as well as other cities in India, across the region and other emerging markets.